Discovering Our State on a Plate

Bringing a ‘buy local’ message to the front of WA's shoppers' minds is a challenge best undertaken with creativity and a lot of great flavour.

If you live in WA, chances are you know we are spoilt for choice when it comes to locally grown fruit, vegetables, meat and other produce. Our role was to help consumers learn some great ways to use local produce and encourage them to Buy West Eat Best. Read more

The Brief

The team at Buy West Eat Best are focused on making sure everyone in the State is aware of the quality of our local produce. They are constantly coming up with new ways to share insights into seasonal food production. WA’s Signature Dish is one of their great ideas; an amateur cooking competition where contestants are tasked with creating an original recipe to best represent WA. The goal is to put our state on a plate.

We came to the table to help launch, brand and raise the profile of this state-wide cooking contest.

The Challenge

In a world full of reality cooking shows and self-proclaimed ‘master chefs’ how could a localised cooking competition cut through an already saturated market?

To shine a light on WA’s amazing local produce, food producers and food producing regions, we focused on activating advocates to leverage the competition and build excitement. This included high profile chefs such as Guillaume Brahimi, local foodie bloggers and local food industry experts, as well as the everyday foodie, home cooks and farmers-markets enthusiasts.

The Approach

Along with creating the branding for WA’s Signature Dish, we built a story about food and the competition via traditional and social media to drive entries and champion the produce being featured in the competition.

A media partnership with SevenWest was integral to the success of the competition and encouraging entries from around the State. Features in The West Australian’s foodie liftout ‘Fresh’, mentions from revered food critic Rob Broadfield and segments on Today Tonight built momentum from the initial call for entries to the final.

Social media was an essential part of the campaign with a Facebook campaign and advertising helping to amplify the owned content posted and that shared by users engaging around the Buy West Eat Best brand and #wasignaturedish. Local foodie bloggers boosted conversation around the campaign. This included high-profile YouTuber Rob Nixon of Nicko’s Kitchen, Martine van Boeijen of ChompChomp blog, Carly Rossbach from Perth Munchkin, Breakfast Confidential’s Liz Sheehan, Michelle Rechichi from Foodie Cravings and Kristy, Queen of Bad Timing.

The Results

The 2015 campaign was another big success, achieving a 25% uplift in social media reach from our 2014 campaign, and generating over a million dollars worth of publicity. On social media alone we successfully reached close to 367,000 individuals.